Telemedicine coming to the region

The nation’s attention continues to be focused on health care reform, a complex issue with many facets – from the cost of care to who gets insurance, from who pays for both to how we deal with chronic disease. But this debate is not just a national issue.

San Diego County will soon feel the effects of advances in the health care industry. Cisco has recently launched a telemedicine pilot program involving the state of California and several health care organizations, including two San Diego County nonprofits: La Maestra Community Health Centers in City Heights and Mountain Health and Community Services, which provides care in rural East County.

The program is designed to realize the benefits of primary and specialty telemedicine services for underserved communities.

In this Internet age, we have the promise of better care and lower costs. However, in order to achieve those goals, we need to ensure that every potential patient – and every community, clinic and hospital – has access to broadband Internet services. As this issue pushes forward, it is important to recognize the benefits of telemedicine applications on the national stage as well as within our local communities.

When it comes to containing costs and improving care, we can quickly see the benefit of broadband. President Barack Obama recently announced a plan to digitize medical records for the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, creating a unified lifetime medical health record for members of the Armed Services. The administration predicts the move will eliminate delays and reduce administrative errors, resulting in better health care.

In addition to digitizing medical records, telemedicine can be applied to life-enhancing applications, such as remote monitoring, treatment and consultations. Health information technology also promises significant cost savings for the health care industry. According to Penn State University, it is estimated that remote home health monitoring for a group of diabetes patients cut hospital care costs by 69 percent, from almost $283,000 per patient to approximately $87,000.

As the physician in charge at the Henry Ford Medical Center — Troy, (Mich.), I have witnessed firsthand the benefits of technologies that monitor patient health issues over secure Internet sites. Innovative telemedicine applications will improve the well-being of Americans by shortening hospital stays, decreasing readmissions, providing electronic prescriptions (and checking for drug-to-drug interactions of prescription/herbal/over-the-counter products and allergies and giving generic and insurance covered medication alternatives), decreasing absenteeism and time taken off work through electronic visits from home or the workplace, and providing a number of other life improving applications.

In addition to San Diego County residents, these benefits should be available to all Americans. That’s why it is critically important that all areas of our country, including rural and urban low-income areas, have access to broadband.

Telemedicine puts quality medical care within the reach of traditionally disadvantaged populations. Unfortunately, there are many Americans who are constrained by income, being elderly or disabled, or are located in rural areas that have little or no access to specialized care. Innovative health care applications, like telemedicine, will open the door to quality medical treatment for these patients.

Patients usually prefer to recover at home, and this puts them at less risk of infection. And of course, by shortening hospital stays and eliminating visits to multiple doctors, we can significantly cut the cost of health care. As stated in a study released by The Benton Foundation, “Health IT can lead to more efficiency, lower costs, and better care for patients. This translates to $670 per household per year. For the median family in America, this would represent 25 percent of its total annual out-of-pocket outlays for health care.”

The obvious benefits of telehealth do not stop at cost reduction. Broadband deployment and adoption can enable outpatient clinics to rely on the expertise of hospitals without requiring patients to go to emergency rooms for non-life-threatening illnesses and injuries. These clinics can be right in work sites, schools, grocery stores or pharmacies – locations that are convenient to the everyday lives of patients.

I’ve only scratched the surface of health care benefits created by broadband access. As this access becomes ubiquitous, we will find more ways to improve health care and cut costs. But that ubiquity will not come naturally.

It’s important that we as a country pursue public policies that ensure everyone has access to broadband service. In some cases, we need to expand the infrastructure to every neighborhood and town. Policies should encourage companies to invest the billions of dollars needed to expand their networks.

Some people can’t afford current broadband prices, so we need to adopt public policies that enable more competition, which will bring prices down. And in some cases we will need to help low-income people obtain service, just as we do now with telephone lifeline services. Cisco’s telemedicine pilot program in San Diego will allow us to see these benefits first hand and feel the importance of telemedicine to all communities.

The future of health care is exciting, but we need to ensure that everyone can participate in this digital future and support policies that enable all to have access to broadband services.

Norwood is the physician in charge of the Henry Ford Medical Center-Troy and is a member of the Alliance for Digital Equality, a nonpartisan consumer advocacy coalition.